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Tag Archives: Middle East

Also coming off of Netflix this week, Above and Beyond, a documentary about the foreign pilots (mostly the Americans) who aided the Israelis in their 1948 War of Independence.

Technically, the movie is well done. It was produced by Nancy Spielberg, the youngest sister of Steven Spielberg, and benefits from access to Spielberg’s Industrial Light & Magic. Historical footage (and an impressive array thereof) is combined with computer generated combat footage and live re-enactments to tell the various stories. Interviews with a number of still-living pilots and relatives rounds out the narrative. This includes commentary from Pee Wee Herman, whose father flew for Israel in the war.

The depth of the story fills in a lot of blanks from when I was reading about the war earlier this year. In particular, when I played with the Arab Israeli Wars solitaire rules, I was always struck by the huge superiority of the Palivar card relative to the Egyptian air force, knowing as I did equipment procurement problems that the Israeli’s faced. The Egyptians had British-supplied aircraft totaling dozens of planes. The Israelis scrounged together what they could.

The core of their air power, shortly after the declaration of Independence, were what one of the pilots in the documentary describe as Messer-shits. The planes mostly came through Czechoslovakia, which was just about the only country desperate enough for dollars to defy the American arms embargo. Even what planes were smuggled out of the United States* often wound up in Czechoslovakia as a staging point. Czechoslovakia had, as a result of the Nazi occupation, a Messerschmidt manufacturing facility, where they continued to produce Me-109s post war. The problem was, they didn’t have all the pieces of the supply chain, and the fighters produced were of low quality overall and were cobbled together from what parts were available.

Despite the disparity, Israel (if I’m following the narrative correctly) halted both the Egyptian invasion and the Iraqi invasion using four Me-109s. The effect was primarily psychological. It was known by all that Egypt’s air force would be unopposed, so when Israeli began flying actual fighter aircraft, it had to be assumed that there were any number more where they came from. Thus, the Israeli air force, such as it was, had a decisive impact on the outcome of the war whereas the Egyptian Air Force simply did not.

The fact that American World War II veterans were flying those planes seemed to more than make up for the deficiency in equipment.

In probably goes without saying, but the movie tells the story of the war from the Israeli perspective. Whether this provides an accurate picture or not would surely be a subject for hot debate, within the right crowd. What is clear from the movie is that those involved – both the Israelis themselves and the Americans fighting with them – genuinely believed that failure in that war could mean another Holocaust. Nearly seven decades down the road we might dismiss much of the Arab rhetoric as bluster. At the time, particularly to those who had just survived the German death camps, it would have been prudent to take such threats at face value.

This, again, was a movie that had been in my queue for some time. I guess I have to thank Netflix for yanking it, as it was worth the time to watch.

*Apparently, to reduce the post-World War II surplus, war veterans were given the opportunity to purchase aircraft for mere thousands of dollars – far below there actual cost. A good chunk of the Israeli Air Force was acquired this way. Although legal to buy, the planes were illegal to export.

While Bir Gifgafa seems to be the most modeled battle of the Suez Conflict, it isn’t necessarily the best from a player’s perspective. Several other battles present more interesting fodder for wargaming.

New Battle, New Game

Taking a look at a new gaming system, I tried John Tiller‘s Modern Campaigns, the Middle East ’67 product. This is one of the products that carried over the HPS Sims days, but with a twist; it has also been released for tablets and that is the version that I got.

The mobile versions of these games are not a straight port. In this example, ME ’67 for the PC offers 37 scenarios whereas the mobile version offers 17. Also, the PC version comes with editing tools, whereas the tablet would seem to be a what-you-see-is-what-you-get situation. However, the mobile versions are considerably lower priced to make up for it – $39.95 versus $2.99.

Armor to the rescue at Abu Agheila.

The engine is somewhere between the grand tactical games of the previous article and the full war. In fact, it is within the smaller end-of-the-scale of what is done with The Operational Art of War. By comparison with the TOAW scenario on the same subject, it is about twice the granularity. Here hexes represent one mile (as compared to 2.5 km) and the time scale is 3 hour turns (as compared to 6); although such a comparison is less clear when you factor in TOAW‘s split turns. Unit sizes are generally the same (infantry in battalions), although ME ’67 appears more likely to have the occasional smaller scale units. I also noticed, in the options, the ability to split units (also an option in TOAW). I’ve never used it in playing either game, but in just a quick try, the TOAW units can be split (arbitrarily, not by company) whereas that doesn’t seem to be an option for the identical units in ME ’67.

Comparing and contrasting, ME ’67 is a more focused product, and it has some details to show for it. For example, the day/night cycle that I complained about in the TOAW version is now included. Two turns per 24 hours (at least in the scenarios I’ve tried so far) are night turns, which are distinguished by reduced visibility and no air support. The details of combat are more obvious in the reporting (the number of men/vehicle kills are highlighted with every attack), whereas TOAW is tracking squads, but I’d be surprised if the under-the-hood accounting is all that different. Also in both, all units except artillery have an attack range of 1 hex. Finally, more in line with the grand-tactical games, ME ’67 makes the distinction between ranged fire and assault by deliberately conducting Divided Ground-style assaults.

One of the complaints I have about the Tiller games is that they tend to be fairly confined scenarios. Movement rates are small enough relative to the duration of the scenarios that your path to victory from the initial setup is rather focused. It is likely an AI thing: if a player could collect up all his troops and swing them around to the rear of the enemy position for an a-historical attack, the AI would probably react very wrongly to it. It also seems that often the “challenge” of the scenario is imposed by the turn limit. In the scenario shown above, this latter wasn’t the case. I had enough time to do what I needed to do. The first observation applies though; there aren’t a lot of options outside of the historical battle – as Israeli, I split my forces and attack using both of the roads headed into the pass.

As a product, it does handle the 1956 war just a tad better than the TOAW version. I’m not sure that is does it $39.95 better. In fact, one of the attractions of this game is that it is on the tablet, and it is a break from the mouse-heavy play of everything else I have. That said, the touch-screen interface is a little quirky. Movement is a press-down until a unit is selected, at which point you can (by continuing to press) create a movement path. It is easy to do it wrong, and that can be annoying. Otherwise, it makes a pretty decent “casual” mobile game.

Last comment is that this is Middle East ’67. Although there are three scenarios for the 1956 conflict, the bulk of the scenarios are for later wars, and so I do plan to be coming back to this one.

Testing 1-2-3

Given the lopsided loss for the Command Ops scenario based on this war, I decided to run a test. Rather than mix the results of terrain, attack/defense, and unit capabilities all at once, I wanted to see a straight-up comparison of the unit capabilities, Israel versus Egypt.

I created a test map, with a large flat area so that line-of-sight would not be an issue. The forces (armor only, no resupply) deployed with the player assuming control near sun-up. Both sides have an objective at the center of the map, so that each side must move towards engagement and duke it out.

The map is mostly flat, though I added some hills and canyons for aesthetic purposes. My armor moved towards the objective (that white square with the blue arrow) in column, and met the enemy coming the other way.

Daylight and lack of terrain features meant that that I had knowledge of the location of the approaching enemy force throughout. About 2500 meters, my units began engaging. This was outside of the effective range of the Egyptians, and they did not return fire. This is much more in line with what I’d expect than my previous version of the scenario.

I also noticed another interesting and, to me, unexpected feature of the game. Once the shooting starts, the ongoing combat disrupts the line of sight and, correspondingly, intelligence about the enemy. The black-outline to the southwest of the lead enemy unit is showing that I previously spotted a unit there, but its current location is unknown. Off the scope of this screenshot, the entire tail of the enemy column was lost once the shooting started, even though it was well within range of sight before.

I am continuing to engage the enemy outside of their effective range. To gain further advantage, I’m disengaging part of my line to extend to my left. The red mark is the game’s representation of my friendly fire.

As I am able to bring my tanks into range, the battle continues as I would expect based my experience with the Bir Gifgafa encounter in other games. As a note, I did not try to tweak the parameters to achieve my results. The Soviet data are from the Germany scenario I played earlier and the Israeli guns are using data for the German 75, upon which the French design was based.

I do appear to have flummoxed the AI. In the above screenshot, while I have deployed my units outside of the enemies range in a line, he appears to have trouble coming out of column and, even after several hours and many losses, has yet to close to his own engagement range. But that wasn’t what I am testing. I just want to see if the Israeli range advantage comes through in the modelling, and it does seem to.

I feel the need to press the attack, so I’m ordering my units to close the distance. This increases the damage I’m doing to the enemy (yellow crosses = destroyed Egyptian units), but I’m now taking return fire and own-side losses.

By mid-afternoon, perceiving I have the advantage, I begin to push forward to seize the objective and eliminate the enemy. Once again, I do see the expected behavior. Once I get into the 1500m range, the return fire from the Egyptians becomes effective.

One major difference in this scenario is the speed of the encounter. Whereas all the other models of this battle keep it within an hour or two, we see in this screenshot has it at about 2PM, having been engaged since 10AM. Obviously, there is nothing implausible about a slower pace. If the commanders do not push the engagement, things may well move slowly. In the end, the Egyptian commander surrendered to me right around sunset. And by surrender, I would assume the game means “conceded victory” by withdrawing, as opposed to turning over all his arms and men.

Riffing on Rafah

Another battle that has treatments from multiple games is the taking of the fortress at Rafah in the Gaza strip.

A 1956 U.S. Army map from just before the war shows Rafah, the 1948 Armistice Line, and the surrounding territory.

In the north, the opening move for the Israelis in the 1956 war was to seize the fortress at Rafah. This separated the remaining Gaza forces from Egypt, allowing Israel both to strike West into the Sinai, and to isolate and destroy the remaining forces in Gaza. The fortress complex was defended by the 5th Infantry Brigade, a mix of Egyptian and Palestinian forces.

Although the initial phases of the operation were deep in the Sinai, arguably the entire raison d’être for the invasion was the occupation and pacification of the Gaza strip. Although, in the event, this battle was a complete Israeli victory (less than 10 casualties), it was nevertheless a critical battle in achieving Israeli success.

The battle for Rafah as portrayed in Divided Ground. The 2D view shows the full scope of the battle, with the Israeli’s striking simultaneously from 3 directions.

Divided Ground has this scenario, and it provides an excellent fit for this engine.

Without buying some more books on the subject, I have only hints at the actual timeline of the battle. It appears that the battle started during the night before, as Israeli engineering units infiltrated the enemy lines and cleared the mine fields. The main attack came after daybreak, and consisted of a rapid, mechanized assault on the Egyptian fortifications.

Comparing and contrasting two versions of this scenario is an illuminating exercise. The Divided Ground scenario (a modified version* of the default scenario, again by Alan R. Arvold) is at the upper end of what is appropriate for this engine. The game duration is about 2 hours, beyond which simulating logistics becomes important in a scenario.

The killers awoke before dawn. The sun has yet to come up, and already my assault has made a hole in the Egyptian position.

The ME ’67 scenario runs eight turns, the two nights bookmarking the actual day of the battle. Approaching the Egyptian positions and even the initial assaults occur during the night turn, while the bulk of the fighting takes place throughout the day.

So which of these two takes comes closest to getting it right? And by right, do I mean which is more historical? More fun? More instructive?

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. I think many grand-tactical scale war games create scenarios “representative” of battles, rather than trying to nail down the details. Was the battle really fought in a two hour period, start to finish? I doubt it. But the pace of the actual assault may well have been that a two-hour time limit is appropriate.

Examining the two scenarios side-by-side, you can see they model the situation very similarly. The finer grain of the Divided Ground version allows for some additional details. For example, there is an armored car unit, represented as two “stands”, on the board. In the ME ’67 game, these perhaps wouldn’t show up as a separate company in the order of battle.

Divided Ground is more fun, and probably a better all-around way to deal with an engagement like this. While the length of the battle more more accurately captured at the operational level, the pace of the battle is probably not. The player slowly moving his armor through the Rafah fortresses does not strike me as how the battle should be portrayed. This should be an example of using mobile warfare to defeat fixed fortifications, and that doesn’t simulate well using dice rolls comparing attack and defense values. Furthermore, the much of the fun comes from the different equipment between the sides. Israel, unable to get her hands on state-of-the-art Western hardware, mixed and matched to create some unique weaponry. Doesn’t the player want to get hands on this equipment, actually interacting with range and firepower and lethality?

Of course, Divided Ground itself is quite an abstraction. Although I’m moving 3D tanks around the “board,” these are all representative of small units. Each “turn” I get two “shots” from my tank against the enemy, but that represents what? How many of my, say, 5 tanks are engaging with how many rounds? It may be a “better” way to play this battle, but is it in any way optimal?

As an aside, I do notice that I was completely unable to reproduce the historical result of minimal Israeli casualties. I lost a bunch of men and equipment in the approach, including having trucks destroyed with infantry on board. In the ME ’67 version, by contrast, claiming all the victory locations with minimal losses pretty much is necessary for victory.

Playing this in Divided Ground does make me wonder whether I should be buying the revamp, Campaign Series Middle East. After fighting not just the enemy, but software oddities (one turn I watched an Arab truck just go back and forth between two hexes, until in ran out of movement) and operating system glitches, the improvements in the newer version start to look really appealing. However, as some of the online reviews pointed out, you are buying basically a modded up version of a 20-year-old game – in this case a 20-year-old game I’ve already paid for. As was said, it’s the kind of thing you’d expect to find for under $10 on Steam. Even at that price, it may be one of those games that you’d wait for the Steam sale. For $39.99?

Mini Me

To get involved with each vehicle and each shot of the main gun, a player needs to break out Steel Panthers.

The size of the Rafah battle, as portrayed in the previous two engines, exceeds what is appropriate for WinSPMBT. Instead, a scenario explores an engagement that occurred immediately after the victory at Rafah. As the defenses at Rafah began to come apart, Moshe Dayan sent the light tanks (AMX-13s) along the coast to take al-Arish. At roughly the right edge of the the U.S. military map, above, the Israelis ran into prepared Egyptian defenses.

The resulting WinSPMBT scenario looks something like Rafah in miniature. The defensive positions are smaller and the attackers are fewer, and there aren’t 3+ axes of attack to manage.

Rushing the wire. I replayed this scenario half a dozen times, trying to figure out how to get close to the historical outcome.

Nevertheless, the shot-by-shot version of this fight gets a bit tedious, compared to the higher level simulations. It doesn’t help that I find this scenario (called Road to el-Arish) very difficult to play. Completely uncharacteristically for me, I tried the scenario something like six times in a row in an attempt to figure it out. Without success, I might add. What gets me is that, not only did Moshe Dayan crack this nut, again winning the battle with minimal losses, but the player is expected to get an overwhelming victory as well – the instructions say anything less than a 2:1 Israeli point victory should be considered a loss.

Since I don’t know what exactly the answer is, I can only speculate. But I think managing the line-of-sight from potential enemy positions is probably a key, and is something that isn’t easy when it to the ancient UI of WinSPMBT.

*I’m actually not entirely sure which version of the scenario I’m playing, the stock or the revised one. See the notes (albeit for a newer version than the Divided Ground one) for differences between the two.

Order of Magnitude

The Arab-Israeli Wars

TOAW: Middle East ’56

The first thing that hits me with this scenario is that map size. It is huge. Comparing to the size of the 1948 Independence War scenario, the hex scale is twice as fine, and the maneuver units are the next level down. Instead of 1 day turns, the turn length is six hours. This is an order of magnitude or more over an Arab-Israeli Wars (the board game) scenario, and sets up the game to last roughly as long as the actual, 9 day, war.

Several deviations from reality are made to improve the game play. As the design notes for the scenario indicate, in the actual attack, the Egyptians had orders to fall back to the Suez Canal. Likely this would tend to trivialize a game at this scale. Instead, for this scenario, the Egyptians are set to “garrison mode.” They will hold their ground, but they will attempt coordinated counter-attacks. This simulates the damaged command and control without having them simply withdraw.

The next deviation is that, at least in my play-through, the British and French demurred shortly after I began my attack. This is mentioned in the design notes as a possibility and I have not looked into the triggers for this event to see how likely it is and what it depends on. This also ramps up the difficulty, as, after some initial air attacks, the Israelis are on their own. The Israeli plans for the operation recognized this as a possibility and still foresaw victory, even under these conditions.

In this case, the scale of the scenario helps to convey the sense of fighting in the desert. There are vast spaces with not-much-of-anything between towns, between units. There aren’t really fronts, as much as units racing through the desert and meeting each other. The less-than-one-day turns do bother me somewhat, because the game doesn’t account for day/night combat or the required down time. I suppose one should consider the turns to be not 6 hours, but each day divided into four fighting segments.

Situation near Bir Gifgafa on November 4th. I’m several days behind schedule for the battle there, and short a tank battalion. All of my 7th Armor Shermans – ALL OF THEM – got stuck in the sand back near Abu Ageila, and will sit out the remainder of this war.

As you can read in my above caption, I am a tad frustrated with some of the hex movement. This isn’t the first game where it has happened, but it is happening repeatedly here. I am getting units stuck in hex locations; they can move into the hex (maybe advancing after an attack?), but cannot move out again. The result is a perfectly functional unit removed from the battle, with no particular warning or recourse. I also took a big hit in victory points for straying too close to the “no go” line, where the British and French ostensibly could play a neutral role in “protecting” Egypt. In the end, this dropped me a victory level and resulted in some very unsatisfying end game text. Note, I didn’t cross the line. Frankly, if there is going to be proverbial “line in the sand,” one shouldn’t be penalized for going up to it without going over.

Mechanics of the game aside, I’m not sure this is the right scale for this war (or war for this scale). The fight (ahistorical French/British action aside) was probably never in doubt at the military level. The grand strategy, the politics (as I’ve said before) are the real story here, but as for the fighting, the interesting battles were at particular engagements where the odds temporarily favored the Egyptians before Israel reinforced. While there is some value in seeing this play out at the theatre level, I think it was the individual fights that would hold the gamer’s interest for this war.

Before heading into the 1956 Arab Israeli War, I’ll return to the scenario I looked at earlier. As I mentioned a subsequent post, there are two games that have redone the old Avalon Hill Arab Israeli Wars scenarios as computer scenarios.

The Kalkiliah scenario, which I recently fiddled with on the board, has been recreated both for Divided Ground and for WinSPMBT.

Apples to Apples, Dust to Dust

First to the Divided Ground scenario. Player Alan R. Arvold recreated The Arab Israeli Wars board game scenarios in the computer version. Even more valuable, his work is accompanied by extensive design notes discussing the conversion.

Looking very different.

While I haven’t done a hex-by-hex myself, based on his notes it would seem the designer made a significant effort to recreate the board designs from the original game. Nevertheless, my first thought on loading the Divided Ground scenario is how different the map looks represented shown as a 3D view as opposed to the abstract symbols upon a flat map from the original game.

Pretty much the same situation. Arab disposition is speculative, as the computer version has units hidden by fog-of-war.

The other major difference is described in the design notes for this scenario. As I stated in my notes on the board game, the key to this scenario is the complexity of the victory condition rules. In a nutshell, the scenario depicts an Israeli raid which initially attacks the town in superior numbers. The attackers are facing a company of regular infantry and police (represented in Arab Israeli Wars by commando units and in Divided Ground by militia). They must quickly take the police fort near the village, and preferably do so before the Jordanians bring the remainder of their infantry, transported on vehicles, into the fray. Once the police fort is captured, the Israelis must withdraw without suffering losses. Should they fail to do so, a rescue force with armor is added to the board and the game length is extended.

The Divided Ground engine does not support the capture-and-withdraw victory condition, so (as is apparent in the first screenshot) the town and fortress hexes are simply designated as standard victory point locations. Second, the conditional availability of the Israeli reinforcements cannot be programmed, so the scenario was created just to last for the longer number of turns, with the Israeli armor always being available.

The final big change from the board game is that the “Fort” counter in Arab Israeli Wars does not have an equivalent in Divided Ground. The scenario was created with a “trench” representing the defensive position. As said about the board game, it is the fort and its particularly powerful defensive capabilities that makes this scenario what it is. Downgrading to just a minor defensive improvement leaves the capture of the fort, in my opinion, so easy as to negate the intent of the scenario.

Assuming you are playing this scenario to replicate the board game feel, one might imagine enforcing the withdrawal condition voluntarily, and then ignoring the computer’s tally of victory points. Likewise, you would have to ignore the arrival of your reinforcements in any case where the prerequisites for the extended game were not met.

In contrast, I played the scenario straight through by the computer rules, ignoring what I knew from the board scenario. As expected, it is weighted overwhelmingly towards Israeli victory (whereas I think the original leans heavily towards the Arabs). I was able to capture the victory locations before the Jordanian reinforcements arrived, and then deployed my halftracks to defend the town from recapture. When my own reinforcements arrived, I used them to mop up the Jordanian forces almost to the man. Which was fun in its own way.

Without the super-defensive value of the fort, I’m not sure I see the point in trying to play by the other board scenario rules.

Just a Nod

Scale

The Arab-Israeli Wars

Hex side: 250 meters
Turn length: 6 minutes

Steel Panthers: Main Battle Tank

Hex side: 50 meters
Turn length: 3 minutes

Recreating the toughness of the police fort is one thing that Steel Panthers was able to get right. Recreating the board game experience using this engine may not be a realistic goal given the difference in scale. The turn length is roughly 2-3 times and the map board at least double* when going from Steel Panthers to Arab Israeli Wars. It may have been feasible to, for example, model only the first half of the original scenario: A reduced unit count would have to take the police fort within the first half-hour or so, eliminating much of the reinforcements and the withdrawal condition. However, that’s not what was done.

Israeli paratroopers converging on the town. That fort will be one tough nut to crack.

A quick glance at the Steel Panther‘s scenario map indicates that, unlike the Divided Ground version, this was not an attempt to faithfully reproduce the Arab Israeli Wars map layout. More likely, it was based on the actual layout of the town and the surrounding terrain and roads.

Approximate size and location of the Steel Panthers game map, shown on a U.S. World War II -era map, with the bit that’s in the screenshot shown in black.

The construction of the scenario is that the full range of combatants are involved, but in the smaller time and space scale of Steel Panthers. The scenario starts with the Israeli paratroopers moving towards the town, but the Jordanian motorized units and then the Israeli armor are fairly quickly added to the mix.

Another interesting addition is that the Jordanians have a PzKpfw IV near the town (as an early reinforcement). Historically, the Jordanians did have some of these German WWII tanks, although not necessarily within 20 minutes of this particular fight.

The condensing of the scenario makes it another knife fight. As with the original board game version, the Israelis have superiority once they get all their equipment into the fight. For what it’s worth, I ended clearing the town completely, but gained only a marginal victory. I made some clearly stupid moves; exposing some halftracks to enemy anti-armor fire in one case and moving into artillery fire in two others.

As I’ve said in many of previous comparisons, the Steel Panthers version tends to be the most “fun” of the options. For this battle, moving individual units and trying to seize an actual building representing the police fortress gives me the best experience playing this battle. The interpretation of the battle is probably the least realistic of the three options, but I’m not sure that accuracy is a feature of any of these simulations.

The 9th Company 2005Kajaki: The True Story (Kilo Two Bravo) 2006Hyena Road 2010

Last night, I took in another foreign production about the war(s) in Afghanistan. This was my third over the last few months.

From the standpoint of an American, we tend to view our wars as American affairs. We also expect our war movies to be American affairs. It can be a little surprising to see a variation on these themes, but from a perspective outside our borders. But of course, the Afghanistan mission is an international one, with plenty of unique stories of soldiers from around the world. And well before American’s involvement, the Russians (Soviet Union) had their own experience in that country.

The three films I watched, I happen to watch in chronological order. All three are based on real events, although all three of course dramatize the story to at least some extent.

The first of the three is a Russian film called The 9th Company. It appear to attempt, at least in part, to tell an under-told story of veterans of that now distant war. Of the three films, this seems to be taking the most liberties with regard to actual events. However, it is not just a bit of patriotic propaganda. It is critical of the Soviet Army and of its mission in Afghanistan, and by extension, critical of the current Russian government. Nevertheless, it received not only a pass through any censorship, but seems to have used government funding in its production.

The film’s structure is one familiar to American audiences. We begin with a mix of recruits in a boot camp for an elite paratrooper unit. We follow them to a deployment in Afghanistan in the waning days of the Soviet involvement in that nation. During the withdrawal, the soldiers become isolated and attacked by Mujaheddin.

The film was very popular in Russia, and the story and production values are sufficient for it to hold it’s own among American offerings, assuming one watches foreign language films in the first place.

The second of the two, released in the U.S. as Kilo Two Bravo, tells the story of an incident that earned Corporal Mark Wright, posthumously, the George Cross for bravery. Of the three, it is the most true to the events as they happened. It is also not a combat movie, in the way the other two are; the story involves a unit of British soldiers who become trapped in an unmapped minefield.

Once again, it is a good film by any measure. It also provides a non-American view on the Afghan situation. In particular, the heroes of the day can be honored outside of patriotism that would accompany (for me) a similarly-conceived U.S. film.

Being a British film, it highlighted one unique aspect of viewing foreign films. In, for example, a Russian language movie, the language is not much of a barrier as I’m relying on the subtitles. In a U.K. film, there are none because it is in my own, native language. Sort of. Watching this film, I struggled to follow the dialog through the accents. In turn, it made it a little difficult to follow the different units – who was positioned where. It didn’t help that the unit designated Kilo Two Bravo remained “offscreen” throughout the film. I kept waiting for when they would show up.

Following the accents was not a problem for the third film, the one that I have just finished, Hyena Road. This provides a dramatic account of the construction of a road through Taliban controlled territory in the Kandahar province of Afghanistan.The construction of the road is real, as is the deployment of Canadian soldiers (whose accents render them indistinguishable from Americans) to provide defense for that construction.

Those accents, however, are one of the details that move this film from the docudrama realm into historical fiction. The soldiers portrayed in the film were members of the Royal 22nd Regiment, of called the Van Doos. That nickname is an anglicization of the unit’s designation in french, le Vingt-deuxième. It is a french-speaking unit, meaning the generic “North American” accents of the actors may have sounded too “American” for Canadian views.The acting was done primarily by Canadian actors, however, so it is “authentic” in that regard. The individuals portrayed are likely all fictional, although the name of the commanding general in the film, Rileman, is probably an anagram of the Canadian commander Brigadier General Milner.

I thought the film was excellent, primary for it’s portrayal of some of the details of asymmetric warfare in Afghanistan. Despite some complaints among critics about the story, I also found that compelling. It is also a demonstration that a big budget isn’t necessary to create an immersive, realistic war movie. Not to say the story doesn’t dramatize the situation. It does. But it is a film based in the real world, not in a world of Hollywoodized gun play.

A lower-budget (~$12.5 million Canadian) film has to make decisions on how to portray the story within their financial restrictions. The hazard is that “small world” problem I like to write about. By focusing on the actions of a single squad, a few officers, and the command posts, the sense of the wider operation can be easily portrayed without having to fill the screen with a multitude of actors.

All three of these films, and particularly the last, deserve a wider viewing than they (almost certainly) got. I don’t know what the viability of films released outside of the Hollywood machine really is, but I hope there is room for innovation from the smaller-budget, non-American side of this industry.

The Horns

The first of the games is Divided Ground, which has a scenario created for the Nebi Daniel Convoy. On March 27th, 1948, a convoy made the trip from Jerusalem to the besieged village of Kfar Etzion bringing reinforcements as well as 120 tons of supplies, equipment, and ammunition. The trip was only slightly delayed, arriving without casualties or losses. However, the preparations for the return trip resulted in additional delay that allowed Arab irregulars to set an ambush along the route.

The prime culprit in the return-trip delay has been cited as one Zimri, a prized stud bull being sent to Jerusalem for safe-keeping during the fighting. Zimri, apparently, was very reluctant to climb aboard his designated transport and his reluctance was a major factor in the several-hours delay. Less often mentioned was the difficulties in loading the fuselage of a damaged Piper Cub aboard a truck, which to me sounds like it would be even harder than getting a recalcitrant bull loaded.

Whomever is ultimately to blame, the result was disastrous for the convoy. Outside of Bethlehem, an ambush was set. A series of roadblocks halted and disabled portions of the convoy, and the Arab fighters closed in to block the retreat.

The convoy departs for the return trip to Jerusalem from Kfar Etzion.

This game, and the level of focus within this game, provide an excellent simulation portraying the nature of this conflict. The fighting, especially before Israel’s declaration of independence, was primarily a series of small unit actions, often between irregulars. I don’t know how accurately this scenario depicts, or is intended to depict, the battle in question. It may be that it is simply meant to represent an ambush of a convoy heading toward Jerusalem rather than get at the details of this particular encounter.

The real engagement, as I said, was a disaster for the Israelis. The convoy was isolated and trapped along the roadside where they were eventually extracted by British forces, but at the cost of the loss of all their equipment and weapons.

In game, I won a “Major Victory,” finding myself in control of the ambush site and the end of the scenario. Given that the scenario length is a little more than a hour, this is not entirely inconsistent with the historical outcome. Likely, simply maintaining control of the battlefield would have ultimately ended the same for the Israelis, regardless of any temporary shifting of the tide. Given my final situation, a breakout through to Jerusalem may or may not have been possible, subject to the difficulties of modeling small-unit action outside of a hour or so scenario. Unfortunately (but as is to be expected from games of this vintage) the credit for the victory may be due the enemy AI. Towards the end of the battle, I was occasionally able to observe Arab units headed back down the road toward Kfar Etzion, perhaps drooling over the juicy victory location shown in the above screenshot. Should they have concentrated their full resources on isolating my convoy, they may well have scored a victory, either in points or from a practical standpoint by pinning me down.

I have just taken Mount Zion and I’m preparing to breach the walls of the old city.

There is also a scenario that covers, albeit abstractly, the events during the night of May 18-19, when a mixed group of Israeli militia attempted to relieve the besieged Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem in advance of Arab reinforcements in the form of the British-led Arab Legion. Again, it is a nice level of gaming to cover this kind of battle. The individual soldier level, such as in a game like Squad Battles, would fail to cover enough of this battle to give a good feel, without further abstracting the scope. At the other end of the spectrum, a battle like this is just to small to try to use the hex-and-counter operational scale of games like TOAW.

Should one have an itch for any pre-Declaration gaming, or as above, similarly-sized engagements during the 1948 War, a game that models the tactical scale makes a lot of sense.

Keep It Simple, No Bull

Which brings me to another game, intended to model the war from the highest level. The game is called Arab Israeli Wars, and it is simply a set of rules published (for free) on the Warp Spawn Games website*. I came across the game in Google while searching for tactical-level scenarios for the 1948 War, which this game is not. See also this work-in-progress computer translation of the same, discovered after I wrote this post.

Arab Israeli Wars is a solitaire game and has no provision for two-player. As I said, the game is a strategic-level model of the war where the player fights as the Israelis from start to finish. It is highly abstracted. Or maybe to put it another way, it is a simple mechanic with “Arab Israeli” chrome laid upon it. These things don’t always work, but in the case I really think it does.

The game is designed to be played with cards, although the rules could be applied to a map-and-counter format as well. In fact, I prefer to think of that way, and will describe it as such, although not necessarily consistently. In the design, each player has a “deck” of unit cards, which are deployed among three “fronts.” One might also imagine that the units are represented by unit counters, and played upon a map. In addition, there is a deck of “event” cards, which drive the historical flavor of the game by randomly conveying advantage to one side or the other.

Combat in the game is deterministic. The winner is the side with the greater total force strength, after bonuses, within the front in question. That is not to say this is a “diceless” game. Some amount of random selection, such as which unit to eliminate in combat, is still used and, of course, drawing cards from a shuffled deck means the game is heavily determined by luck.

Play is by turns. In each turn, the Arab units are drawn and placed into one of three fronts. It is the “chrome” that makes this game far more interesting that it’s simple mechanic, and with unit placement that chrome starts to become evident. Placement is determined by unit nationality. The Syrian and Lebanese units are placed into the Northern Front, near Galilee. Jordanian, Iraqi, and Palestinian forces are deployed to the Central Front, in the vicinity of Jerusalem. Egyptian, Saudi, and Moslem Brotherhood forces deploy on the Southern Front (the Negev). Some generic forces, such as armor, artillery, or air, are deployed to a random front.

Next, the event for the turn is drawn. The different events have different advantages, which may mean extra units, one-time extra (or reduced) strength for existing units, as well as some special modifiers.

Finally, Israeli units are drawn which the player is allowed to freely place. In addition, one or more of the units already in play (depending on several factors) are moved between fronts. Again, the historical connection to this simple mechanic is notable. Israel fought with, essentially, the advantage of interior lines. While beset on all sides, they were able to redeploy forces between major areas of operation during the war to gain a local advantage. Their enemy, by contrast, were independent nationalities, meaning cooperation between fronts was greatly reduced (if not impossible).

As I mentioned above, once all units are place, combat consists of totaling all forces (each unit type has a single force number) for each front, and comparing. The side with the highest value wins and removes one enemy unit (at random) and then gains one increment of territory. Each front has six territorial steps. The Israeli player loses by losing all six steps in any of the three fronts. He wins by winning battles on all three fronts two turns in a row, or by simply holding out until the Arab unit “deck” is depleted.

I’ve played through a number of games, and the design seems pretty well balanced. It feels like there is a slight advantage to the Arab player (perhaps necessary to keep a solitaire game interesting), but games do go either way. I strongly suspect the design was borrowed and modified from another game, perhaps an ancients or medieval tactical game. There are references in the rules to “flanks,” as well as unit attributes not used within the game. I haven’t tried to search to find the “parent” rules, but I’d gamble on them being out there. Assuming I’m right, this probably accounts for a play balance that seems just about right.

There is a huge amount of luck involved, but the design relates it back to historical events. For example, the key event for an Israeli victory is often one of the two U.N Truces. In game terms, that halts battles for one turn and gives the Israeli two extra units. It may well be that the timing of the ceasefires, along with Israel’s ability to rearm during that lull, were the key to Israel’s ultimate victory in the war.

Of course, it does take a little imagination to relate the simple mechanics back to a historical “simulation.” But is that a bad thing? Does a simple game like this give enough combination of flavor and challenge to satisfy, or would more detail make a better game? Take a look at the Victory Point Games release Israeli Independence**. In many ways, a very similar construction with tracks for territorial gains and an event deck to drive the game. But it amps up the complexity a bit. There are five tracks instead of three. Israeli combat is now event driven, rather than unit driven, and there is just a bit more variability to it. I don’t know that it is any more historic, however. Events determine whether Arabs (automatic) or Israelis (by die roll) advance, rather than a building of units. The result is that turns are more independent than in Arab Israeli Wars, which again could be good or bad. Bad, that is if adding more simply adds complexity.

I also wonder if this basic framework provides a “generic” way of simulating wars at the modern level. For example, if we go back to Korea, we find a war that might benefit from similar treatment. The linear map and triggered events could probably easily describe the battle, as well as the turn-by-turn adding of fighting units to the game. I’ve noticed a growing use of linear representation for strategic-level warfare. Israeli Independence was the first game of Victory Point Games’ States of Siege Series, which has grown substantially in production value and sophistication. I was also recently looking at Churchill, dealing with the defeat of Nazi Germany, which uses multiple linear fronts to represent the combat portion of the game.

All of this is to say that, conceptually, the simplified, linear tracks seems to be a mechanic that works in wargames and I’m sure I’ll be back with it. Getting back to the game at hand, it certainly provides a way to cover this conflict. To actually address the breadth of this conflict over its entire length using more conventional methods would probably take a far, far more complicated gaming system.

Baffle them with Bull

So what about the more traditional approach? One of the original Operational Art of War scenarios covers Israel’s October offensives in the 1948 war. These took place after the pair of UN cease fires, which in reality served to allow the Israeli military to reorganize and rearm. When the conflict resumed again, Israel not only had the initiative, but the fighting was moving away from the small unit, irregular action more towards conventional warfare forces and operations.

Nevertheless, at least to my uneducated eye, the game system has to take substantial liberties to squeeze this war into the Operational Art of War box.

The scenario, itself, is not a terrible one. The scale is 5 km hexes, which is the same as the Czechoslovakia and Fulda Gap scenarios played earlier. The unit scale, counter-intuitively, is larger. Each counter is a brigade rather than a company. This probably makes sense. This was not a war of maneuver, and reducing the counter-count probably helps with that. Turns are 1 turn per day. The scale is such that the entirety of Israel is covered on the map, and the uniqueness of the terrain and geography are clearly portrayed.

My IDF forces capture Jerusalem’s old city and Gaza, while pushing the Egyptians south. I think, historically, that brigade (Givati) just to the right of the map’s center may have been directed south as well.

Even with the major offensives of October, operations were still conducted dancing around various cease fires and truces. The game will naturally play out as a more conventional operation, with a fairly consistent pace of attack and maneuver through the scenario’s 31 day duration. For the actual confict, several of the “fronts” had operations limited to a couple of days or, in the case of Operation Yekev south of Jerusalem, a single day.

As I say, it’s not a terrible scenario. It is probably a little more enjoyable to play than those NATO versus Warsaw Pact scenarios, due both to the unit scale and the more interesting locality. It also is yet another interesting demonstration of the versatility of TOAW covering the ad hoc order -of-battle of this war. But as a simulation of the conflict, I think it does demonstrate that more isn’t necessarily better.

*I’ve just got to say, because it has to be said. That black text on Cyan background absolutely fries my eyeballs. This site has wonderful information but it is almost literally painful to look at. After a week or two of suffering, I finally broke down and made a Greasemonkey script to get rid of the color scheme. Much better now.

**Note, I don’t have this game and have never played it. However, the rule book is freely available from the publishers website to allow a comparison simply on the rules themselves.

Shortly after I started posting about games, history, and the history of my games, it occurred to me that some of this information would best represented via a timeline. WordPress organizes posts mostly in the reverse order that they are written, meaning that a reader who isn’t following along in real time encounters things backwards. Even if they’re inclined to follow along in reverse order, there’s no guarantee I’m going to write all the topical posts at the same time. Where posts will naturally be organized into historical events, it seemed to me like there should be an easy way to represent them.

My first stop was to see what was available as a WordPress plugin. I did find a few offerings with some mixed results, but in the process discovered a very interesting piece of software. Knight Lab at Northwestern University has developed a script to display easily-configurable, multi-media timelines.

The way it is designed, it is meant to be inserted into a webpage or blog post. However, WordPress doesn’t support that. With some editing of the page code one might get around the limitations, but I’m currently using the free version of WordPress, so that was also out of the question. In the end, I liked the look of it and decided to simply link to a full page display of the time line (again, over there to the left.)

You may have noticed that I’ve started progressing through the Cold War and explored a number of games covering the late 40s and early 50s. When I got to the Arab-Israeli War of 1956 and the Suez Crisis, I found myself searching online for games that covered this period. In doing so, I stumbled across some rather intriguing websites cover the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

My first accidental find was a game, which I talk about in my next post. As you’ll see, that discovery drew me into the 1947-1948 timeframe and so I dug around to look at other wargamers’ take on the that period. I quickly found a set of posts dealing with that war, and particularly dealing with it from the wargamer’s point of view. It is a different perspective. If nothing else, the information is organized by what we wargamers like to see; locations, dates, and orders of battle. The author, clearly, meant it all as a start for developing some Arab-Israeli War scenarios, so it isn’t a comprehensive reference. It emphasizes information that might lead to development of wargame scenarios. Among his information is a timeline for for the period, starting during the First World War and continuing through to the first Truce in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

This timeline presentation was very useful to me. As I’ve said before, it is difficult for the uninitiated to make sense of all the different personalities and organizations in that war. Up until the forming of the Israeli Defense Force, the combatants were a range of different militia groups with a rather convoluted lineage going back decades. Throw that on top of my minimal understanding of time and place, and it becomes almost impossible to follow who is fighting whom and when.

So as I was looking at his timeline, it occurred to me “Wouldn’t it be neat if I had this visualized in the Timeline tool I’ve been using for Wargames.” It seemed to me it would be an easy thing to whip together, even it if was only for my own personal amusement. The Knight Lab system uses a spreadsheet* to create the configuration and it should be just a matter of copy-pasting the information from the existing format into the desired format, relying on the tool to do the plotting.

Of course, like anything computer related, it never seems to be as easy as you would think it would be. It ended up being a good bit of effort. On the plus side, it did make the information much easier to digest which meant just the exercise of reformatting the data helped me understand the nature of what was there. For example, the original author seemed to only get so far with his project, as the original timeline goes only through the beginning of the first Truce of the war (June 1948). It also became apparent that there were different levels of granularity. Outside of the 1947 and 1948 conflicts, events are spaced out over the decades. But during combat operations, there are multiple sets of events going on simultaneously. It is not uncommon to have multiple events per day taking place in different locations, with the timeline bouncing back and forth between operations for many days in a row. As it turns out, plotting events like this on a timeline presents somewhat poorly and so the result remains difficult to read and digest.

The first thing I did, which incidentally addressed this point, was to split up the timeline progression at the end of the Second World War. I did not want a new timeline to overlap the existing timeline I’ve been working on for the Cold War. The Israel timeline itself hit a lull during the Second World War as the world’s focus on defeating the Nazi’s seemed to allow the Arabs and Jews to defer their differences in Palestine. I actually added a couple of extra references at the end of the new timeline, where flashback events from my games from the 1950s took us into the 1940s.

Issues remained, however, with depicting the multi-front nature of the fighting, event when focused on the short time periods. To help resolve the problem, I made use of one of their other tools. The Story Map tool allows a similar layout of slide to be integrated with a map (or, for that matter, any graphic) if the information to be displayed is more geographical than chronological. The best use of this tool is probably something like the example, where the combination of time and distance is fairly linear. Less useful are examples where the “story” has you bouncing around the map, as just so happens with these these battles.

Nonetheless, I think it does improve the presentation to break up, as I have, the timeline into five distinct sectors, whose timelines are handled separately.

Perhaps the most significant event of the war was the pair of truces arrange in mid-1948. Although both sides used the lull to reorganize and rearm, Israel gained particular advantage from the ability to create a national army and purchase modern armaments. It is at this event that the timeline at Balagan.info stops, and so do I with my graphical conversion. While I may be tempted to begin mixing in information from other sources, I’m no longer simply re-presenting that work, which broaches some ethical boundaries.

When the fighting resumed in October, the military advantage had shifted to the Israeli’s where it mostly remained until the signing of separate armistice agreements in 1949. I found a timeline through that period, including Israel’s October offensives, which, interestingly enough, also cites Balagan.info as a source.

So there it is. The whole project can be viewed starting with the timeline in 1917, and following the links to get to the additional details. Hopefully this helps with your understanding of the 1948 Arab Israeli War and, by extension, the wars in that region that followed. It has for me.

*As one option. Data can be compiled into a spreadsheet, which then is run through the script hosted on the university website. You can also create the data structures and/or host the script locally, depending on how you want to organize the data.

Thirty-five or so years ago, we were at the crest of a wave of military boardgames from the likes of Avalon Hill and SPI. We were also entering the era of the personal computer. For players of these games, we expected that nirvana was right around the corner. First, the computer could provide us with opponents**, rather than forcing us to draft our girlfriends or younger brothers. Second, as the rules of board war games got more and more complex, simulating all the details of the wars they modeled, we saw the computer as a handy bookkeeper. No longer would we have to cross reference results across 5 different tables. Just select attack and let the machine work it all out.

As games began to develop, they often disappointed. Getting a computer to do everything we wanted it to was a lot harder than it seemed like it would be. Still, our dreams seemed just a few iterations away.

As an Avalon Hill guy, my list of games were:

Tactical – Advanced Squad Leader

Grand Tactical – PanzerBlitz/ Panzer Leader

Operational – Oddly, I had no go-to WWII board game. The Operational game I owned was Waterloo.

Strategic – The Rise and Decline of the Third Reich

Honorable Mention – Submarine (I always thought this would have been the easiest to convert)

The Operational game, for me, was solved for the computer early on. The amazing Chris Crawford created Eastern Front in 1981 and provided an early example of getting it right. It was available across platforms, I had a copy on my families Atari 800.

Perhaps supporting my theory, and perhaps showing us the way of the future, the computer game Silent Service was released in 1985. It was not, however, a “board game simulator“, reproducing the hex-and-counter movement of a game like Submarine. Instead, you are put inside the submarine, using the gauges, maps, and periscope as your interface. Much of the wargaming world would take decades to learn the lessons about what works better and worse on the computer screen.

In the other areas, direct conversions of the games themselves proved to be elusive. Avalon Hill’s Third Reich (1992) conversion was largely a disappointment and the in-the-works Squad Leader development for the PC never seemed to materialize. However, as we progressed through the 1990s, computer games which were actually capable of replacing those board games began to appear on the market.

Everyone’s list is going to be a little different, but for me this was how it happened.

In 1992, High Command fulfilled the promise of Third Reich that the official game never could. Yes, it lacked all the nuances in the rules that made the original board game what it was, but it was playable and it was fun.

The floodgates seemed to open after games began releasing on Windows. Programming for games started to be less an exercise in trying to get more speed, memory and graphics out a system and more reliant on a common base structure. Perhaps it was just that the machines were more capable, or perhaps because this freed developers to write games instead of graphics optimization, but the games that starting coming out then still can look passable on the modern desktop***.

In 1996, Close Combat finally brought the tactical WWII game to the PC in a way that satisfied the hard-core wargamer’s thirst for realism. We’ll not argue on how Advanced Squad Leader may have fallen short of realism all along, but Close Combat brought the right pieces together. Although for me, it was Combat Mission (1999) that changed landscape and finally provided the long sought-after experience. See the Submarine/Silent Service comments above.

For PanzerBlitz, we were given our fix in 1997 when East Front was released by Talonsoft as the final installment in their Battleground series. Interestingly, while Battleground was mostly Civil War and Napoleonic War scenarios, it was book-ended by two World War II games. East Front fulfilled the PanzerBlitz niche by providing the toolkit for grand-tactical level combat on the Eastern Front. But Battleground 1 was a Battle of the Bulge game (1995). Amazingly, the look and feel of the latest in John Tiller’s game at that scale, Panzer Battles: Battles of Normandy, would be very familiar to the purchasers of Battleground: Bulge-Ardennes.

Battleground 11: East Front was followed by the titles West Front (1998), East Front II (1999), and Rising Sun (2000) to round out the World War II experience of Panzer Leader, PanzerBlitz and beyond to the Pacific under the heading the “Campaign Series.” In 2001, the Arab-Israeli Wars equivalent was added as the final iteration of this set of releases.

Quite forgotten, until I started looking at the release dates, was Battleground 10. Battleground 10 was a Middle East game, but one I don’t remember anything about when it came out. Searching finds precious little on it, so I wonder if my experience is not typical.

I myself bought Divided Ground, perhaps as a part of a Campaign Series package with all four games. This was considered to be the Ugly Duckling of the series. It had considerably less innovations than the releases that preceded it and had complaints about bugs that, unlike East and West Front, seemed never to be fixed.

All this reminiscing and I never got around to actually playing the game. I suppose you’ll have to wait until my next installment for that.

But, still, the saga continues.

In late 2015, the same “ground” was covered by a Matrix Game release, Campaign Series: Middle East. Looking very much like a Divided Ground II, it actually is based on a different evolution of the engine. To get there, we have to go back again, this time to 2007. Matrix aquired the Talonsoft rights and released the World War II games as the John Tiller’s Campaign Series product. This product is supported and upgraded to be compatible with current operating systems, as well as additional content and improved performance. It can still be bought, new, for probably significantly more than I paid for my Talonsoft CDs when I picked them up. Part of the plan was to, at some point, bring the Divided Ground code up to date in a similar manner. Instead, the decision was made to completely re-implement the Divided Ground concept within the current version of the World War II engine and release it as a new product.

For me, this proves to be an armored combat simulation too far. The new Matrix Game has the advantage that it is new and under active support. It also appears to have quickly developed a fan base for mods and scenarios. (One interesting mod allows the use of Arab-Israeli War counters as game icons). But at its core, it is based on the Talonsoft series and still looks like a 20-year-old gaming engine. Compare Europa Universalis with EU IV – that’s what I’d expect for a “new” version of a 15-year-old game, worth full price.

And still the tale goes on.

John Tiller’s took his gaming system first to HPS and then to his own John Tiller Software. What he did not take is the 250 km scale hexes. He has scaled up, to 1 km hexes and down to 40m hexes (with unit sizes of individual vehicles), but has taken neither system into the Arab Israeli conflict. While at HPS, he also created the Modern Campaigns/Panzer Campaigns engine (1 mile hexes) as an operational wargame. This system is used to cover the Arab Israeli Wars. In fact, the Tiller product line includes a tablet version of the game. More on this to come.

*I’m not trying to tell you what to do. But Divided Ground is abandoned software that nevertheless requires full price on Amazon. Furthermore, it is unlikely that it going to work on your computer. I was unable to install, perhaps because it was 64-bit machine and the installer software can’t handle that. It also may not work with Window 7 or 10.

**Bad AI seems to shadow the computer wargame industry to this day. Interestingly, the PC has also solved this problem, just not the way we wanted it to. Modern gamers can find opponents any time, day or night, through Skype and through computer-assisted gaming tools like VASSAL.

***One interesting aside. While High Command can be downloaded and run on a Windows 10 machine, Divided Ground pukes at the site of the Windows 7 box on which I first tried to install it. I got it running on older XP, but it is ironic that many of these early Windows games used special tricks which limited their life much more than all the wildness of DOS games.